I bought the ALDL Cable from Customefis.com at this link http://customefis.com/cableorder.html. I have WinALDL and have done a lot of searching on the boards here on what I need to hook all this up to get some actual readings. I have a '85 2.8l v6 auto with MAF if that makes a diffrence. The cable has two wires on it and the DB9 on the other end for the laptop. I believe I hooked everything up correctly when I first tried it but did not get any results. I hooked the cable Ground and the other into the fourth spot over from ground(A) and got nothing. Am I hooking this up right I do not know if I need a 10k resistor or not because I cannot find a definative answer in the forums for my ecm. I am using a gateway 9550 laptop with XP sp2 installed. Anyone have any ideas or can tell me what I am doing wrong because I am sure it is probably an error happening between the seat and the keyboard and probably not the cable itself or software.

Matt

 

I needed the 10k resistor hooked up, in my '88 MAF 2.8

 

To test the cable, try using HyperTerminal (does it come with WinXP?) and use the COM port that the cable is hooked to. Probably com1.

Make sure that local ECHO is turned *on*, and the baud rate is 9600.

Then try typing something into the hyperterm window. You should see double of what you typed.

I wish I could get more specific, but I don't use windows any more except on my old laptop, and that isn't around right now.

 

What programs are needed to view the data? Does WinALDL work ok? Can you use other programs such as Datamaster32?

 

I am going to try the 10k resistor this weekend when it stops raining here in sunny florida and see if that helps. i am sure it will do the trick but I will keep you up to date.